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Category: space travel – Page 336

SpaceX, NASA hold press conference, historic astronaut launch clears final hurdles before readiness

With less than a month to go before the historic first crewed flight – and final human rating certification test – of the SpaceX Crew Dragon Demonstration 2 mission, NASA and SpaceX jointly held a full day of pre-mission press conferences on Friday, May 1st. Throughout the day many minor, but crucial, details were revealed.

Two primary technical concerns remained prior to Crew Dragon’s debut astronaut mission- the final drop test of the Crew Dragon Mark III parachutes and NASA’s clearance of SpaceX’s resolution of an in-flight engine-out anomaly suffered during the ascent phase of a previous Starlink mission.

Hopeful for launch next year, NASA aims to resume SLS operations within weeks

With the Space Launch System’s inaugural test flight now officially delayed to November 2021, NASA says work halted by the coronavirus pandemic will resume within weeks to prepare for the first test-firing of the SLS core stage at the Stennis Space Center in Mississippi.

The last official schedule from NASA had the first SLS test launch in March 2021, but managers have said for months that schedule was no longer achievable. After a thorough review, NASA says the first SLS launch — named Artemis 1 — is now planned in November of next year.

The most powerful launch vehicle since the Apollo-era Saturn 5 moon rocket, the Space Launch System will carry an unpiloted Orion crew capsule into space. The Orion spaceship will orbit the moon to demonstrate the capsule’s capabilities and performance before NASA commits to flying astronauts around the moon on the second SLS/Orion flight in late 2022 or early 2023.

Nanoarchitected metamaterial with material achieves the theoretic limits of stiffness and strength

Question: When you’ve designed the world’s most efficient metamaterial, one that could change the way cars, planes and even space exploration vehicles are built, is mostly air yet reaches the theoretical bounds for stiffness and strength and can equally resist forces coming from any direction, what do you do next?

Answer: You break it.

At least, that’s what a team of material scientists including Jonathan Berger of UC Santa Barbara and Jens Bauer of UC Irvine did. Their goal? To learn what boundaries could be pushed with a novel metamaterial called plate-nanolattice. The research findings are published in a paper in the journal Nature Communications (“Plate-nanolattices at the theoretical limit of stiffness and strength”).